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Man Survives 3-hour Sinkhole Nightmare

ATLANTA, GEORGIA — Two days after being pulled from the mud of a creek bottom where he was stuck up to his neck, Kenny Beach still can't believe his fortune.

"Monday was my birthday, and I thought I wasn't going to have another one," Beach, 28, said in a phone interview from his home near the Atlantic Coast in Brunswick. "I'm still so sore I can hardly move."

Tuesday's ordeal began after Beach took his small rowboat out into a Fancy Bluff Creek tributary that runs behind his house to recover pieces of a broken dock. The creek was at low tide, so he had to leave the boat and walk up the muddy bed and was sucked into a sinkhole.

"It was instantaneous," Beach said. "I was up to my waist before I knew it, and the more I struggled, the more I sank. I was eventually in up to my neck."

He was stuck for three hours before rescuers--called by his mother-in-law after she heard his screams--reached him as the rising water was reaching his nose in the darkness. He said he also feared drowning as the tide rose.